How Facebook Poaches From Google, Yahoo and LinkedIn

For most of its five years, Facebook had the odd reputation of being a hot startup where lots of people should want to work, while simultaneously being a company that was not always able to attract and retain the industry's top talent.

We spoke with Facebook's top HR exec, Lori Goler, to find out what's changed at the startup to improve its recruiting efforts so much that as much as 10% of Facebook employees are now former Googlers.

(Of course, the main change from years ago is that there's someone like Lori at Facebook, targeting and recruiting top talent. We understand that in prior years, recruiting at Facebook was much more of a case-by-case operation. Facebook's VP of product Christopher Cox is said to be responsible for finally organizing this team.)

Lori said the main problem Facebook had recruiting anyone before a few months ago was that people were tentative to move to new companies during a down economy when their current employers would happily boost their salary to keep them within the fold.

But beyond a brightening economy, Lori says the other big change has been her team's effort to offer recruits more "visibility" into Facebook's finances and its work culture.

To combat the swirling Silicon Valley narrative that Facebook was somehow in trouble financially, Facebook shared some of its financial projections with the press a few months ago. They announced revenues were up 70% year-over-year, and that the company would be cash-flow positive in 2010. Rumors that Facebook would hit revenues near $550 million in 2009 started sprouting up too.

Facebook's other big "visibility" effort was in making a much more concerted effort to talk about what it's like to work at the startup.